Portraits from the first 100 years of photography
This cabinet card portrait was taken at the studio of F.B. Walcott in the town of Berlin, Wisconsin. The back of the card has a logo with F.B. Walcott, successors to S.M. Taylor printed under it. I've cropped and enlarged the logo, below, to make it legible. The green background is unusual: (You can see... Continue Reading →
This carte-de-visite came to me from England (Northamptonshire), but it has nothing written on it to identify the sitter or photographer. The photo (print) was cut into an oval shape and glued onto a paper mount with an oval frame design already printed on it. Such cartes were generally made after someone had died, as... Continue Reading →
According to information in an article in the St. Cloud Times in July 2015, the town of Richmond, Minnesota, was officially called Torah for nineteen years, from 1890 until 1909. It had been called Richmond informally by locals before that, but when the town was incorporated in 1890, the name Richmond was already in use at... Continue Reading →
The two cartes-de-visite above were made by Henry Cushing in Windsor, Vermont, in February 1865. Windsor is on the Connecticut River, which forms the boundary between Vermont and New Hampshire. The town is connected to Cornish, NH, by the Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge, which is the longest wooden bridge in the United States and the longest... Continue Reading →
If I could ask this handsome couple one question, it wouldn't be, "Why does it look like you're in North Africa?" No, it would be, "What is your relationship to each other?" My first assumption was that they were sister and brother, based on the way they're posed in the studio. Then I noticed she... Continue Reading →
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was a magnet for immigrants throughout the 19th century. The largest group came from Germany, beginning in the 1840s. The next-largest group came from Poland in the decades after the American Civil War. Other large groups included British, Irish, Scandinavians, Serbians, and Russian Jews. The bride in the portrait above looks Southern or... Continue Reading →
This couple has flair! Her dress is decorated with intricate beadwork, ribbons and flowers. Could it be a wedding dress? What do you think? The cabinet card was made by the studio of William James Wellsted & Son. The back is dark green (blank).
This carte-de-visite isn't the first wedding photograph on the blog, but it's the first portrait of a bride and groom without attendants. For some reason I've been slow to appreciate wedding portraits as a genre, so I haven't bought many over the years. I found this one in January while doing research for an earlier... Continue Reading →
This cabinet card was made at a studio called Atelier Mąke in Gnesen, Prussia, which is now Gniezno, Poland. An astute visitor to this page, D.B. from Milwaukee, informed me that Atelier Make was owned and operated by a woman named Ludwika Mąke, who worked as a professional photographer in Gniezno for 35 years. That's... Continue Reading →
This stereograph (stereoview) was made from real photographs in 1898 by commercial photographer Truman Ward Ingersoll (1862-1922) of St. Paul, Minnesota. Ingersoll produced many images of Ojibwe (Chippewa) people and their ways of life in northern Minnesota. I was unable to find additional information about the couple in this portrait. In the Library of Congress's... Continue Reading →
Tokens of Companionship 
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